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Guest Review: Mayhew On Szumigalski

Anne
Szumigalski’s A Peeled Wand is a
collection rooted in the landscape, and in human transformations mirrored by
the natural world. It is divided into three parts, the first roughly concerned
with childhood, the second with war and death, while the final section explores
spirituality. However, the fluidity of the poems often transcends these
boundaries, making the collection richer and more engaging.

For
Szumigalski, her poetry of the landscape is also a way of reflecting on the
body. ‘The Fall’ tells the story of a distant country where children are
flowers and adults, trees. The daughter of the poem is consumed by the mystery of
her always fully-clothed father. Following her father’s death, she unbuttons
his shirt to find:

...the
chest of an old

tired man,
the tangles of coarse grey hair intricate as

twigs, the
nipples hard and resinous as winter buds.

(‘The
Fall’)

Despite
the ordinariness of what she uncovers, the man’s transformation is complete;
through death, his body becomes the tree. This same theme of death as
transformation occurs in ‘Halinka.’ In the first stanza, she recounts the
notion that stillborn children should be buried with a mirror so that, ‘...at
the/ resurrection...she will see her face and recognise herself.’ Szumigalski
uses this poem to explore the physicality of a stillborn baby, ‘There was a
heart in your chest, red and/ whole as a candy.’ This visceral, yet child-like
image acknowledges the body which she will return to the ground. The poem ends
with a ‘white iris growing in the/place your understanding,’ hinting at both
the child’s partially-formed eye and the importance of self-recognition, and the
flower which marks her grave as well as the site of her transformation.

Szumigalski’s
use of punctuation is deft. In ‘Halinka,’ the measured commas contain the
poet’s grief, whilst the abandonment of punctuation in ‘Shrapnel,’ emphasises
the dying soldier’s fleeting memories, giving the poem a sense of urgency. Death
is again a key theme; he asks the earth, ‘is
this my final place my own place,’ like the ground that contains the
stillborn child. However, the reader is denied the moment of transformation,
leaving the soldier, ‘...pushing him away from himself.’ Szumigalski’s visceral
focus is again evident in the soldier’s epiphany-like realisation of why he
loves women’s bodies more than the violence of men’s: ‘for pale skin covers/ a
man all over and only a wound can show his lining.’

It
is not only the body that is fragmented by war in Szumigalski’s poems. Time is also
collapsed, as seen in her ‘Untitled’ poem, ‘I was my own mother and I nursed
myself. I was my own child and I suckled myself.’ Here, the events of the
Holocaust have shattered the natural order of the family and the cyclical
repetition of futile actions emphasises the despair of the lone female
character, until, ‘nothing remains of [her] but ashes in the wind.’ Elsewhere,
Szumigalski presents a more dream-like view of the War dead. In ‘The Varying
Hare,’ a young boy recounts how his father explains the missing soldiers:

...they
were led away

not to be
seen again probably

they are
out there still stepping it

over hill
and through marsh

their
boots never leaving a print...

(‘The
Varying Hare’)

Here, the
gap between the father’s vague response and his son’s interpretation casts a
mythic shadow over their deaths, ghosting the child’s dreams. In his sleep, the
boy visits a hare, but knows, ‘nothing can keep her/ from the various
predators/ whose prey she is.’ The father’s tale triggers a loss of innocence
in the child, ‘tomorrow she may change as we all must/ to scrap fur in a
tattered bundle.’ This realisation of death echoes the poem’s epigraph from 1
Corinthians 15:52, ‘We shall not all
sleep, but we shall all be changed.’

This collection also explores the
importance of identity. In ‘On Being a Stranger,’ the woman answers the
children who deliver her mail:

I am, I
answer, the foreign woman

Though I
haven’t moved from this place

For twice
as long as you’ve lived

(‘On Being
s Stranger’)

The
speaker affirms the title bestowed upon her, and yet negates it by emphasising
her permanence against the children’s lifespan. Similarly in ‘The Elect,’ it is
a child who finally reminds the flowers of their names, ‘’Daffs,’ she says,
and, taking each of us by the neck,/ yanks for the love of God.’ The act of
naming is one of destruction.

I was the struck by the musicality
in certain poems. In ‘Our First Gods Were Fishes,’ Szumigalski writes:

Each
spring we watched the passion

of their
spawning, saw how their fingerlings

swarmed in
the light of the green shadows.

(‘Our
First Gods Were Fishes’)

Here, the
sibilance mirrors the sound of the waters in which the fish spawn, whilst the
half rhyme of ‘spawning/swarmed,’ carries the reader into the ominous couplet
of hooks and barbs.

A
Peeled Wand is a collection haunted by landscapes, both inner and outer.
What makes them so engaging are the transformations that Szumigalski reveals, transcending
the human cycle of birth and death.

Jessica Mayhew is currently a student at Northampton University.
She has a forthcoming poetry pamphlet titled Someone Else’s Photograph with Crystal
Clear Creators. She blogs at driftrook.blogspot.com.

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